The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

by Jack Campbell

  “I’ll assume that responsibility,” Geary said. “And, for the record, I want it to be clear that you properly advised me regarding your misgivings and that I acknowledged them. This is my decision.”

  “Yes, sir. We will get the information package together and have it sent to Tanuki as soon as possible.”

  “Make it quick,” Geary emphasized again.

  Desjani was giving him a fish eye, but he ignored that for the moment as Iger’s image disappeared, instead calling Tanuki. “Captain Smythe, I need Lieutenant Jamenson. Don’t worry. It’s a temporary assignment, on my word of honor. There will be a package of intel information coming to Tanuki soon, eyes only for Lieutenant Jamenson. I want her to go over it and tell me what she sees.”

  Smythe’s expression had shifted through worry to puzzlement and now surprise. “Intelligence material? Lieutenant Jamenson is very good at what she does, Admiral, but that is not something she has experience with.”

  “I’m aware of that. But we’re dealing with new tactics by the enemy, and I want to see what a new perspective might spot among the information we have.”

  “Very well, Admiral.” Smythe had a calculating look in his eyes. Geary could guess what he was thinking. Is Jamenson even more valuable than I thought?

  “Thank you, Captain Smythe. I have every confidence that I can count on you,” Geary said, emphasizing every word.

  Smythe jerked as if the phrase had stung him, then smiled. “Of course, Admiral.”

  Geary ended the call, then looked at Desjani, who was giving him a flat look. “Lieutenant Jamenson?” she asked. “The one with the green hair?”

  “You remember her?”

  “She’s hard to forget. What’s the idea?”

  “Exactly what I said,” Geary explained. “Maybe she will see something going on in this star system that the Syndics have tried to hide.”

  Desjani considered that, then nodded judiciously. “If the Syndics can get something past Gioninni and Jamenson, we might as well throw in the towel.”

  —

  GEARY took his time preparing for the recovery of the prisoners. He brought the fleet, still in the Armadillo, over the inhabited planet at a slant angle from the prison camp, letting his ship’s sensors scan the entire area while the Marines launched surveillance drones to drop down and check out the camp from low level and at ground level.

  Carabali briefed him personally, her image standing in his stateroom before a series of close-ups of the prison camp.

  General Carabali pointed to the images near her. “We couldn’t find anything with the remote-surveillance equipment. Nothing is there that shouldn’t be there, as far as we can tell. But remote surveillance can’t be exhaustive. There are too many ways to block signals and signatures, ways often configured to match weaknesses or limitations in remote-surveillance equipment. That’s especially true in a camp that was newly constructed. One of the things we look for is new features. New concrete slabs, newly turned soil, new patches on walls, new underground cisterns and other storage areas, things like that. But the entire camp is new, so that offers us no clues. We know the camp isn’t surface mined because we’ve seen people walk around freely, and command-detonated or -controlled mines could be spotted by the gear we had to check out the camp. Still, the Syndics are very good at booby traps. To be certain that there wasn’t anything hidden, we would need to put a few hundred engineers down there and give them a couple of weeks to probe, dig, and examine with the best gear we’ve got.”

  The old headache was back. “But the surveillance confirmed the presence of Alliance prisoners of war,” Geary noted. He could see them in the images, some of them clearly enough that expressions could be identified, clearly enough that friends and relatives could easily know them. The expressions of the Alliance prisoners reflected wariness, hopefulness, disbelief, and other emotions. Very likely, the Syndics had not told them that the war was over. They did not know what star system they were in, and they had never expected rescue.

  “Yes, sir,” Carabali agreed. “Roughly six thousand. We talked to some of them through the surveillance gear. They were hauled out of prison camps in other star systems without any notice and dumped here within the last few weeks.”

  “What else?”

  Carabali gestured to the images again, her expression dissatisfied. “There’s been a lot of activity outside the camp-construction area. The ground shows signs of a lot of activity for a radius of about seventy kilometers around the camp, but, again, our sensor sweeps found nothing of concern. There’s a dense web of paved and unpaved access roads crisscrossing that area, most showing heavy use from what must have been construction equipment and loads intended for the prison camp. We’d have to go in and dig extensively to see if there was anything under those roads or elsewhere.”

  “Seventy kilometers?” Geary asked. “Outside the camp?”

  “Yes, sir. It doesn’t correlate to any kind of threat I know of, and my engineers say when a project is being rushed, they tear up everything around it instead of being careful with grass and trees and stuff.” Carabali sounded as if she herself wasn’t too sympathetic regarding the fate of “grass and trees and stuff” if important work needed to be done fast.

  How could something seventy kilometers outside the camp threaten a recovery operation? If the Syndics wanted to nuke the recovery force, they just needed bombs within the camp. “What’s your gut feeling, General?”

  Carabali paused, looking at the images. “I don’t know of any reason not to go in,” she finally said.

  “That’s not exactly a strong endorsement of that course of action,” Geary observed.

  “It’s not my call, Admiral.” Carabali frowned. “I’m dodging the question. If the decision were mine, I’d go in. I can’t offer any reasons not to go in except for a total lack of trust in what the Syndics might do.”

  Geary snorted a derisive laugh. “Anyone who did trust the Syndics at this point would be crazy. What about buried nukes?”

  “If they’re there, those nukes are buried deep and heavily shielded.”

  The plan called for eighty shuttles, almost every one available, which would each have to make two trips to get all of the prisoners up to the fleet. “What’s the absolute minimum number of personnel I can send down to do the job?”

  Carabali considered the question. “Zero personnel. Send the shuttles on full auto, programmed to land, pick up the prisoners, and return. But that runs the risk of the Syndics subverting the systems on the shuttles since they’ll have physical access to them. Worst case, they could load them with nukes instead of prisoners and the shuttles would tell us everything was fine until they docked in our ships and went off. Not so worse but still bad, discipline could break down, the prisoners could stampede for the shuttles, killing any number of their own as they all tried to cram on board, and possibly disabling some of the shuttles. Even in the best case, where the Syndics didn’t try anything, any major system failures on any of the shuttles could result in loss of the bird and any prisoners it might have picked up.”

  “How many Marines are required to avoid that?”

  “Enough to operate and conduct emergency repairs on the birds if needed, and enough to provide security if the Syndics try to board a shuttle or if crowd control of the prisoners is needed. Shuttle pilot. Copilot. Flight mechanic. A fire team of three Marines for security. Six per shuttle. That is the minimum I would recommend, Admiral.”

  Six per shuttle. Eighty shuttles. Four hundred and eighty Marines. Geary studied the images for several seconds, thinking. “All right. I think we have to try this. Those six thousand prisoners are counting on us. Put your plan together. I’ll have the fleet in position to provide fire support if needed and to provide cover if any of the Syndic warships pretending not to be Syndic warships try to attack the shuttles.”

  —

  FROM orbit, worlds displayed different personalities. The ancient standards were living planets like Old Earth, blue an
d white, with patches of different colors on the landmasses. Geary had heard of the Red Planet near Old Earth, and had himself seen countless planets that revealed different personalities ranging from the multicolored clouds of gas giants to the bare rock of small, hot worlds.

  The habitable world in Simur Star System seemed to have been painted by an artist who had nothing but shades of brown. Even the small seas looked like muddy expanses of rust. The stretch of sand dunes at the hot northern pole were a lighter terra-cotta shade. Near the equator, some patches of green could be seen, where farms clung to the planet’s narrow temperate zone. The few cities, barely large enough not to be classified as towns, were also near the temperate zone. The prison camp was located halfway down toward the south pole, the construction scars around it a multishaded tan/khaki/beige patch in the middle of a vast, empty plain. At the cold southern pole, the land was a murky chocolate color, like thick mud, interspersed with streaks of dirty ice that was so dark as to be nearly black.

  “What a hole,” Desjani muttered, putting into words what nearly everyone in the fleet must have been thinking.

  “Let’s get this done and get out of here,” Geary agreed. “General Carabali, begin the operation. All units in the First Fleet, be prepared to engage any warships that threaten the shuttles or the prison camp.” At least with the fleet in this tight a formation, communication delays were too tiny to be noticeable.

  The four groups of Syndic ships were all less than a light-minute distant, close enough to be worrisome but not close enough to justify postponing the recovery. The guards at the prison camp had fled in the few available vehicles, leaving the prisoners no longer watched over but still effectively imprisoned by the wasteland surrounding the camp.

  The planet scrolled by beneath the fleet as the shuttles launched, coming down toward the camp in waves.

  Geary, his nerves keyed up to highest alert, watched his display, waiting for something unexpected to happen, for some threat to materialize. The first wave of shuttles were penetrating the atmosphere of the planet, the site of the prison camp becoming visible on the planet as the orbiting fleet approached it from high above.

  The high-priority signal that blared at Geary came from an unexpected source. Why would Tanuki be calling—?

  Geary hit accept, his worries multiplying rapidly.

  Instead of Captain Smythe, he saw Lieutenant Jamenson, her green hair contrasting vividly with a face gone pale. “Admiral! You have to call off this operation! They’ve got the mother of all traps down there!”

  Jamenson didn’t wait for a reply, but kept talking, the words spilling out of her so fast that Geary could barely understand them. “I just put it all together. I’m sorry . . . I . . . there are two engineering units identified in the Syndic comms. They were in this star system recently, and I know those unit designators. They’re both the equivalent of what the Alliance calls planet-breakers, engineers who use large and superlarge munitions for certain specialized tasks. Two of those units, Admiral. And the only major new construction in this star system is that camp.

  “There was lots of large excavation gear here, and a very large amount of drilling equipment. I recognized the Syndic equipment codes. They dug some big holes and did a lot of drilling very recently.

  “And there are some strange materials identified in cargo manifests or off-loading documents or transportation requests or gossip between individuals. Individually, those materials have a few uses, but together they are very reminiscent of an Alliance research project five decades ago. The code name . . . never mind the code name . . . the nickname for the project was Continental Shotgun. Bury a lot of very powerful nuclear munitions and use their energy when they explode to pump a huge field of single-use particle beam tubes. The research project aimed to turn a section of a planet about a hundred kilometers square into a one-time-only dense field of particle beams that could annihilate an invasion fleet when it passed above that region of the planet.”

  Jamenson gasped a deep breath before she could continue speaking. “But it was abandoned because the weapon effectively destroyed the planet it was supposed to defend. The seismic impact of that many explosions that massive, the amount of material hurled into the atmosphere, the huge amount of nuclear contamination, it all combined to inflict massive damage and render a planet almost uninhabitable. That, and the target had to pass over the weapon, which was hard to guarantee.

  “And there are several indications that senior security-force commanders have left the planet within the last few days. They and their families. Supposedly some expensive off-site gathering at what passes for a luxury resort on the largest moon of the habitable world, a moon that never orbits near the segment of land centered on that new camp.”

  Geary wondered just how pale he looked. Iger had passed on the reports of the senior personnel leaving the planet, but that was common enough behavior for high-ranking Syndics when danger threatened and hadn’t aroused special alarm. The four small groups of Syndic warships, he now realized, were not positioned anywhere near a line drawn upward from the center of the prison-camp location. The hit-and-run attacks by those Syndic warships and their near presence had kept Geary’s ships in a tight defensive formation, and the tight Alliance formation would form a perfect target for a dense, wide field of particle beams as it swung above the prison camp to provide protection and orbital-firepower support as the Marine shuttles landed.

  Landed on the center of a region rigged with massive nuclear munitions.

  He was barely aware of his hand hitting the emergency comm overrides. “All units, this is Admiral Geary. Immediate execute, abort the landing operation. I say again, abort the landing operation. All shuttles are to return and be recovered as fast as possible.”

  Can I alter course before the shuttles get back? How long do I have? I can see that damned camp. Will the Syndics trigger that continental shotgun if they see us aborting the landing so they can get as many shuttles as possible, or will they wait and see if we’ll come back?

  They need to think we’ll come back.

  “Emissary Rione, immediately contact the Syndic authorities and tell them we have to postpone the landing and recovery operation because of . . . contamination issues. We think there might be an unknown disease among the prisoners and need to recheck the test results before conducting the landing.”

  Rione watched him, obviously surprised by Geary’s anxiety and frantic words. “Immediately? I’ll send the message now and ensure they receive it. How serious is this?”

  “About as serious as it gets, but don’t let them see that you’re worried. Make it seem like a bureaucratic holdup.”

  “I’m a good liar,” Rione said. “Consider it done.”

  “Tanya, how hard would it be to . . . double the size of this formation? Increase the distances between ships by that factor?”

  Desjani had already been focused on him, not having heard what Lieutenant Jamenson said but well aware that something had badly rattled Geary. Now she didn’t hesitate. “Not hard at all,” she said, her hands already flying across her display. “Done. I can transmit the modified formation whenever you ask for it. Let me know what’s going on when you can.”

  “We underestimated them,” Geary said, his eyes on his display. The shuttles were turning around and coming back, some of them having already entered atmosphere and having to climb out. Another urgent message came in, this one from Carabali.

  “What’s going on, Admiral?” the Marine general asked. “Why did we abort the landing?”

  “I’ll give you the details when I can. Just get those damned shuttles recovered as fast as you possibly can.”

  Rione was back. “CEO Gawzi has been informed. She wants to know how soon we will carry out the recovery operation.”

  He checked the orbital data. If the fleet held its current path, it would swing over the prison camp region again in . . . “One and a half hours. Tell her one and a half hours, then we’ll conduct the recovery. Make sure she fe
els confident we’ll go through with it.”

  Victoria Rione also knew when not to ask questions but just do as he asked. “Yes, Admiral.”

  What else could he do? “We have to look like everything is routine except for aborting the landing operation,” Geary said out loud. “Until we get the shuttles on board. Are there any orbital changes I can make that won’t mess up the shuttle recovery but will alter our track over the planet?”

  “What are we trying to avoid?” Desjani asked.

  “A region about seventy kilometers across centered on the prison camp.”

  “Seriously? Swing our orbit a couple of degrees toward the planetary equator. That will actually assist recovery of the shuttles and allow us to skim the edge of that region you’re worried about.”

  Geary gave the order, then sat staring at his display, watching the shuttles approach, the closest wave nearly back among the fleet.

  “Admiral?” Desjani prompted.

  “Admiral!” Rione said, as her image reappeared. “That Syndic CEO is more nervous than she’s been before. Very nervous. But she said they would expect us to conduct the recovery in one and a half standard hours. If I know why I’m lying, I can do a better job for you,” she added pointedly.

  It would take half an hour, a very long half an hour, to get the shuttles recovered. Geary keyed in Carabali and Rione, then spoke so Desjani could also hear as he described what Lieutenant Jamenson had found.

  “The entire landing force would be wiped out,” Carabali said grimly, “and every prisoner down there would be blown to atoms as well.”

  “We’d take a lot of damage,” Desjani said. “It’s hard to say how many hits they’d score, but with our ships in this tight a formation encountering a dense field of powerful particle beams, we’d very likely lose dozens. Not to mention damage to ships that weren’t a total loss.”